Phantom

I have tested Linux every year or so to see where it was and if it was ready for the desktop, each time I tested Mandrake along with Redhat, Suse and some other distro's. Altough other distro's seem better for servers, Mandrake has always been my first choise for the desktop. Even this, and now I'm 100% M$ free, my choice went to Mandrake, after testing Mephis, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Suse. Why? Ubuntu: gave me to many problems with my video card, laptop tools and VMware5 and Gnome isn't what I expect from a desktop env. Kubuntu: It just wasn't stable, KDE kept on crashing and the same problems as Ubuntu on top of it. Suse: If I'm going GNU/Linux then I want to do correctly, Suse is turning into the M$ of the Linux world, way to commercial for me. Altough Mandrake has commercial version also I prefer their commercial strategy, the Club is a marvelous idea. And if you don't have the $$$ then you can still run the free version, not like Suse where you can do it but only with the older versions. I tried Fedora but it wouldn't install on my latop. Even if I wasn't happy with Ubuntu my wife loves it, it remebers her of her Amiga yeaaaaaaaars ago, and it runs perfectly well on her laptop. I tried also a live cd of Linspire, but no thanks, that looks just like WinXP with a new skin, and it's way to commercial for me. And don't take me wrong with the commercial remarks, I just bought for over 200$ stuff from Mandriva, so I do support the Linux community with my €€€ ;)

Thanks bvc, I just thought I was completely wrong, but 28pts seems HUGE to me. It could be that this person has some eye problems and needs them this big, but he might be better using some kind of magnifier then, should be available in the accessibility options.

Ok, got them to work now, thanks to Gnome ;) but still working in KDE. You'll need to launch : gnome-keybinding-properties, from there you can add the shortcuts to Firefox, mail, etc... using the extra buttons. The output of the buttons is : 0xec for the mail button 0xb2 for the web button The extra buttons P1 and P2 ain't giving any code back, still workin on it.

Not really, it only works on the Travelmate series, I have tested it on my Ferrari and the Aspire series, both don't work. I managed to get the extre keys like Email, Web, etc... working but only under Gnome 2.10/Ubuntu, they don't work with Mandrake/KDE or Kubuntu. If someone has a workaround then I would appreciate it.

OMG!! My font size is set to 8pts, I can't image what kind of screen size you must have, 54" and running 2596x2596? Mine is a 15,4" and running 1400x1050.

Using KDE you can configure your FN buttons for volume control and many other functions. You can do that through the accessibility tools => Keyboard Layout There you activate the keyboard layout and select your country. After that you select the "Laptop Computer Dell Inspiron 8100", restart your X and voila it should work. Tested on 4 different Acer laptops.

Aopen are selling the stuff to build your own laptop, or you can have a look at Compal, they can sell barebones also. Barebones include the screen, the case and the motherboard wich has most of the time firewire, lan, serial, lpt and sound on board. From there on you can the cpu, gfx, mem, dvd, etc... EDIT: but you can forget to get those cpu's in a lappy for now, the best you'll find is an AMD3400.

You're right, I cheked again and the version was 2.6.10-5-386 compared to Mandriva's version 2.6.11-6. So the kernel version difference is even less.

Done

As some might have read in my previous posts I had a lot of trouble getting my broadcom wifi card to work in 2005LE. Yesterday I decided to reinstall it all after messing around with settings and tools to get to learn Linux. So there I go, format it all, reinstall, re-download Ndiswrapper, compile it and BANG, nothing works, no way to get the drivers loaded. I tried every way possible but nothing would help. I reinstalled almost 30 times in 1 month, always followed the same procedure that worked to get my card working, never had any trouble, and now this. So I reinstalled 2-3 times 2005LE thinking I might have done something wrong there, but nothing helped, at the end I remembered that the first time I got it to work was under Ubuntu, so I gave that a go and it worked. Installed Ubunut, downloaded Ndiswrapper 1.2, compiled it, loaded the driver and voila, me have wifi. So having got that to work I backed up the compiled directory on a USB drive just to make sure. Not wanting to remain on Ubuntu 'cause I liked Mandriva, and I'm getting a boxed version + Club subscription next weekend, I decided to give 2005LE another go. Reinstalled 2005LE, copied to Ndiswrapper directory from my USB drive, made a "make install", loaded the driver and voila it worked. Try to understand that. So I checked the kernel version of the Ubuntu machine of my wife 2.5 compared to 2.6 on mandrake, that's where the difference is. Ndiswrapper 1.2 doesn't work if you compile it on a 2.6 kernel, it needs to be compiled on a 2.5 kernel. I've got my wifi working now, but man, this was one hell of a headbraker

C'mon guys, leave it here, my question was simple and I got the answers, thanks again, but close this topic before a real war brakes loose ;)

It all depends on your budget ;) You can have Acers starting of 800€ and it can go up 'till 4000 - 5000€ for some Ibm's or Alienware machines. If you look at the 2 lappy's in my sig, the Ferrari Acer cost me +/- 2800€ and the Travelmate 1300€. Most lappy's will come with a DVD burner but watch out for the following things: 1. You want battery life then go with Centrino or A64, stay away from P4 2. You want a nice screen, then don't get anything below XVGA (1400x1050), and remember, the bigger the screen (17") the less battery you'll have. 3. Watch out for the hard drive, you have 3 options, 4200RPM, 5400RPM and 7200RPM, I have the latest and I must say that today I would prefer the bigger disk of my wife's laptop although it's 5400RPM which I don't even notice. So don't go for the fastest, you won't notice, ofc if you ain't a benchmark freak ;) 4. Look at the weight, I just installed a Toshiba Quosimo for a friend and man, that thing is HEAVY, I wouldn't like to carry it around. 5. Maybe try to get one with the Nvidia Geforce 6600 GO instead of the ATI cards, they seem to be better altough I'm very happy with both my ATI cards.

First french link is going nowhere 404 error on Toshiba site. Second french link is a discussion that starts with somebody pointing out some cheap pc's Mandrake was selling and it derives to a discussion about how much a standard Linux pc can cost. I don't get the link between both :blink:

type "route" and check your routing

I have similar problems. At my job I need eth0 and at home wlan0, so both need to be started at boot time, which leads to enormous boot times. When being at home I need to shutdown eth0 first otherwise wlan0 won't pick up a dhcp address. I wrote a basic script so that I can choose which networking profile I want to use after bootup.

Ok, thanks for the info guys, I'm done with the partitioning sheme. / has 58GB SWAP has 1.5GB on the external disk /backup has 50GB (will keep sys backup + home backup) /data has 200GB (will keep video, audio, docs, rpm's, etc...) From all I've read here partitioning isn't needed at all, at most for a server where you would keep www, mail and user docs seperated. Now I'm converting my wife's laptop, she just had a serious virus + worm so that gave me a reason to preach all the good things of Linux, installing right now :D

Those sites didn't really help :( Either they talk about the PCTV SAT PCI cards or they are very outdated which would make me think that the current kernels would include the support. I keep on looking. Thanks anyway.

I searched for support for this TV Card but I didn't find anything on google. Somebody knows a guide on how to get this working ?

What's the goal of your cluster ?

Read this ;) http://www.netcraft.com.au/geoffrey/toshiba.html

Thanks John. Funny still that the partition utility automaticaly starts to create partitions for every subdir it needs. I thought also that it would become a waist of space but wasn't sure it this was the way it was ment to be under linux distro's. Even when googling for some examples I only found people that were seperating everything in partitions. Many stated that having a seperate one for /var and /tmp was good to avoid fragmentation. Now, I don't know how fragmentation is with EXT3 or REISERFS ??

Have a look here : http://unix.freshmeat.net/projects/opensharepoint/ PS: I found this through google :P

Well last time I used to automatic partitioning during install and it set up 6GB for / 1GB for tmp 1,6GB for SWAP 50GB for /home With this sheme I ran out of diskspace on / I'm in the process of discovering loads of tools and apps for Linux so I install loads of them, both with Gnome and KDE. Also count that I'll be installing Cedega/Point2Play with a couple of games that take up some space: Warcaft3+TFT = 1.5GB UT2004 = 5GB BF1942 + addons = 3.5GB HL2 + steam = 3GB I'll be running also VMWare for both WinXP (6GB) and maybe some testing on other distro's or I might install other distros on a seperate partition on my external drive and use the USB boot capability of the lappy. For the rest I need at least 7GB free for video editing. Other major apps: maybe CrossOver Otherwise loads of little stuff that I'm testing from the URPMI sources and KDE-APPS.

Ok, so I'll partition like: Internal: 40GB for / 20GB for /home where I can have a temp area for DVD editing External 200GB on /data 50GB on /backup Thanks for the input everyone

I guess the problem is that you're paying for software you don't want. You should be free to choose but now they force you to buy an M$ licence. Or another example, you break your laptop, you need to buy a new one, why on earth would you need to pay for another M$ licence? Activation is bound to the hardware but a simple call to M$ will provide you with a new key to activate on the new hardware. It would be so much better for everyone, Linux and M$ users, if we wouldn't be forced to buy licences each time we buy a machine. Just my 2c